In my final week, we wrap up with the PCB design of the product prototype and retrace & document the work completed in my nine weeks at Aeste. For one last time, click here to skip to the conclusion. Routing Completion The design of the circuit board is complete. Last Read more…
Work on designing the PCB layout continues in earnest. We encounter a few software issues relating to the hardware of the task, which prompt some worried thoughts. As always, here’s a look back at the previous week. Click here to skip to the conclusion. Pin Assignments During design it became Read more…
With the footprints done, wrestling with PCB design continues as usual with component placement and routing. Also this week, I hit a minor snag with regards to simple yet confusing aspect of my task. Blow-by-blow account below, but click here to leap to the summary. Layout & Design Rules As Read more…
Continuing from where we left off last week, we make a few last-minute additions to the Spartan-6 schematics and design the footprints of the components in preparation for PCB design. Just a short post this week, but click here to skip to the conclusion. Hardware Schematics With all the pins Read more…
Previously, the PIC18 was programmed to emulate 3 separate slave SPI devices – an ADC, a Flash memory and an Ethernet controller! The final task proved to be a notable challenge, and remained only partially implemented by the end of the week. This episode: there will be a double dosage Read more…
Week Four! How time flies, it’s been nearly a month since I first stepped into the office of Aeste. Continuing from our previous work of setting up a basic SPI bus between a Raspberry Pi (RPi) master and a PIC18 slave, we go on to write a function for the Read more…
Last time, we faced the challenge of designing the circuit and hardware interfaces of our Spartan-6/PIC18 board. This week, we return for more work on the schematics and shift focus to a different aspect of our project: writing the firmware for the PIC18. My colleague, Jia Xien, has been busy Read more…
After some more thought and discussion with my supervisor, it was decided that we should program the Spartan-6 FPGA using the Slave Serial method. This would be slightly easier to implement and is closer to the original design brief, which is to have a master PIC18 and slave Spartan-6 during Read more…
Another week, another intern. I started on 28 June and was told by my supervisor that I’ll be working mainly with Jia Xien in contributing to the hardware and firmware aspects of Aeste’s current project. After going through the basic tutorials on Git and C, I dove right into my task of the week: researching and weighing configuration interfaces for an FPGA. If you’re feeling an onset of TL;DR-itis, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.